This was a pretty great finale. Interestingly, the dynamic duo from the previous book are solidified partners now, though still ostensibly despised by the murder squad. They’re given busy work that turns out to be not a simple Murder. At all. A woman is murdered in a domestic dispute and her best friend thinks it’s a mystery date dude… and that’s about all they have to go on. Only, the more they dig into the victim, the more things don’t add up. Her entire persona seems constructed and the number one suspect is too easy a target.

Meanwhile, the social politics haunt Antoinette, the lead investigator and protagonist. She’s sick to death of her all-male colleagues, continually dealing with the same kind of sexism that we see in the first two books. Not much has changed, but judging from the age of Frank’s daughter in the third book, small world building things like that suggest it’s been a solid while - probably a decade and change. It’s hard for Antoinette to know who to trust. She keeps disintegrating, as the case begins to stall.

It’s a solid book. But my favourite parts of the series have been where it straddles literary lines, usually by deep diving into the past of the characters, which break wide open due to the case. But that doesn’t really happen with this and the previous book. They have their dynamics to negotiate, but it feels much more like genre fiction. It’s a bit tropey and the prose are still great, but I don’t think the character work is up to snuff. And without the past, it kind of feels like the first book, only with a different location and it wanting to address the gaslighting sexism Antoinette deals with, which is how she functions in the previous book, too. I liked the resolution of that. But… it does still feel like a conventional end.